Quote:
Originally Posted by keep it simple
To me, any so called "church" that has significant assets beyond historical real estate, is full of crap, & most of those that qualify under the KIS scrutiny, are still full of crap. Believe what you will, but any organisation that asks for money without direct accountability & without latency in transparently showing it's final destination, is full of crap.
+1 .. not entirely full of crap .. they offload crap in order to attract dollars As Larry said, if he believed himself he'd have given everything he had away to charity. He knowingly and wilfully created a situation where he KNEW people would be busted by his nonsense.

Class action!

What would be the point of donating all that money to charity if the world is apparently going to face the end anyway?

Wassup Duncan? Stressing at an airport at an ungodly hour? Are you okay?

Just coming back from seeing my other half. She's moved to an island in the middle of the sea for a year for work and she had to go to work this morning and hence needed to drop me off at an ungodly hour. I don't like flying much, hence the stress and when I went out last week I had an absolute nightmare with travel connections - the train I was on to the airport actually broke down and meant that although I'd left myself two hours for problems, I still had to persuade them to open the check in desk after it had closed!

So, needless to say - I don't like flying much. Right now I'm sat on a train in Manchester using my phone as a modem. Oh, the jetset lifestyle of a third-year Music Technology undergraduate in the post-industial North-West.

Just coming back from seeing my other half. She's moved to an island in the middle of the sea for a year for work and she had to go to work this morning and hence needed to drop me off at an ungodly hour. I don't like flying much, hence the stress and when I went out last week I had an absolute nightmare with travel connections - the train I was on to the airport actually broke down and meant that although I'd left myself two hours for problems, I still had to persuade them to open the check in desk after it had closed!

So, needless to say - I don't like flying much. Right now I'm sat on a train in Manchester using my phone as a modem. Oh, the jetset lifestyle of a third-year Music Technology undergraduate in the post-industrial North-West.

I relate. Not keen on commuting. I enjoy the buzz of looking out the window and takeoff but the checkin, the waiting, the crowdedness, queuing to get off and luggage collection is a real grind.

If you were the leader of the notorious Children of PFOG sect (known for making loud staccato noises and atrophying on web forums) and I was one of your many followers, then I'd say it's a fair comparison.

I said I was thinking of getting into this racket. After reading this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by GRUNTERSDAD

A few years ago his "church" was worth 20,000,000.00. Now thanks to the idiots that believe in him the church is worth 120,000,000.00

I'm bloody well confirming it. Children of PFOG sounds good. Want in? And when it's time for our doomsday I give you the cup without the poison.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pollyanna

As it is, all you are to me is a web pal who seems to either drink too much or wants to drink too much

I'll have you know I resemble that!!

Actually I just made a milkshake. A MILKSHAKE?!?!?!? Of all things......

It wasn't that bad at all actually. I thought we might be in an ashy sky at one point just as we were banking over Liverpool, but it was probably just low cloud. My parents are flying to Orkney in two weeks - that could be interesting if the volcano goes again.

Well, archeology speaks for itself. Of the oldest complete Bible ever found (Dated approximately 150 A.D. i believe, correct me if I'm wrong), we have found it's content to be over 95% of the same content as any current day Bible. And wherever there is a difference, it is written on the bottom of the page. I must say, they did a fine job of preserving it's contents..

Well, actually, this statement isn't true at all. Archeology has spoken on this matter, and here is what it has said:

There was never an "oldest complete Bible" to be found. The Bible as most Christians recognize it was compiled or "canonized" by the Catholic church in the 4th century. That means they took all the texts that had been found up to that point, and edited them. They included some texts, and excluded some others. They took some stuff out and added other stuff in. Their editing was determined as much by scholarship as it was by plain old politics. The result was what most people today call the Bible, and the oldest surviving copies date to about the same time, not 150 A.D. (You are probably thinking of the Gospels, which are thought to have been written from about 50 to 110 A.D., but there are no surviving copies, and the Gospels are a small--although important--part of the whole Bible.)

And since then, there have been many translations, versions, and outright rewriting (not to mention mistakes made by monks in making copies) of the Bible. Different Christian denominations recognize different versions of the Bible. So there is not and never has been one "original" Bible that modern versions can be compared to.

Whew! That was a mouthful.

I am all in favor of everyone believing or not, however they see fit. But one thing that everyone should realize is that the Bible has been altered many times in many ways over the years. It may (or may not) have been the work of God (or inspired by God) at some point. That's a matter of opinion depending on your personal beliefs. But the fact that it's been monkeyed with many times by humans ever since is indisputable.

Criz, you make a good point. I confused the scholarly dating with the oldest actual piece of the writing found (obviously two different things, my mistake). But how exactly do we know it's been monkeyed with and/or altered many times like you say it was?

__________________
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis

This causes problems with the canon of the Biblical story and because so little of the original text is known, the differences in interpretation can become manifest in outright contradiction. Indeed, even when we have original texts, there are outright contradictions:

This makes it near impossible to determine the original intentions of the authors of the text - which usually isn't a problem, but the intentions are vital to determine the meanings of Biblical (and extra-Biblical) works.

Well, archeology speaks for itself. Of the oldest complete Bible ever found (Dated approximately 150 A.D. i believe, correct me if I'm wrong), we have found it's content to be over 95% of the same content as any current day Bible. And wherever there is a difference, it is written on the bottom of the page. I must say, they did a fine job of preserving it's contents.

And there would have been no reason for someone to really "taint" the Bible, as it still wouldn't give one a whole lot of personal benefit. Just my opinion.

Even if 95% of the original bible is the same as original (which i find doubtful) then that's still a hell of a lot of words that are different. And even 1 word being wrong can totally change the meaning of the text. For example, language experts think that the passage in the koran about the 72 virgins might not actually have said 72 virgins at all, but rather the original word might have meant "sweet-meats". Now imagine the last 10 years and the actions of muslim extremists if they had known that...

Even if 95% of the original bible is the same as original (which i find doubtful) then that's still a hell of a lot of words that are different. And even 1 word being wrong can totally change the meaning of the text.

But like i said, wherever there's a version that says something different, the bottom of the page shows the word/words that are different.

__________________
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis

Criz, you make a good point. I confused the scholarly dating with the oldest actual piece of the writing found (obviously two different things, my mistake). But how exactly do we know it's been monkeyed with and/or altered many times like you say it was?

Sorry to be coming back to this so late… got preoccupied with more fun business yesterday. I'm restoring a bass drum.

Anyway, first off just to be clear, I didn't mean any disrespect by using the word "monkeyed". But I happen to believe in Evolution, so I think it's an apt word.

How do we know? Most Biblical scholars agree on the following:

Let's start at the beginning: in the 300-400 years between the death of Christ and the canonization of the Bible, Christianity was in its infancy. Many texts were written by many people, possibly none of whom had actually even met Christ. So many details of Christ's life and the new religion in general were interpreted and written down differently by all those different writers. One of the key differences during that time was the question of Christ's divinity: was he a god, a man, or something in-between? Then around the 4th century, the Catholic church set about taking all the previous writing and thoughts and making it all consistent, creating what they called the Dogma. They made the decisions as to what was the approved story, the book that then became the Bible. Everything else was thrown out.

Part of that process was simply about continuity, or picking the best version of a story that appeared in more than one text. But another part of it was about weeding out the troublesome elements that refused to agree with the accepted dogma. Like if you thought Christ was not divine (once it had been "decided" that he was), you were called a heretic, and if you didn't recant and accept the party line you were persecuted and very often killed.

(By my way of thinking, that's the major problem with the Bible, right there. Gatekeepers deciding for the rest of us which truths were "true". I've always had a big, big problem with authoritarians and censorship.)

Then, as the link theindian posted describes, when the Bible and other manuscripts were copied by scribes in the monasteries, mistakes often crept in. Even some outright changes in wording were sometimes made. And sometimes even a change of one word can alter the meaning of a whole sentence or even the whole story.

Then, different denominations accept different versions of the Bible. The King James Bible is different that the Catholic Bible, for instance. (Specifically on the subject of the Rapture... look it up.) But if the Bible is truly God's Word, how can there be different versions. Who would dare change it?

And translations introduce errors. Many languages don't share equivalent words, so you have to pick the closest match. But that often colors the meaning. Even popular English re-translations of the Bible, like the Good News Bible of 1976, seem problematic. Who decides what is the best or most accurate way to change God's Word for a modern audience?

And finally, in our modern day, after the discoveries of other early Christian and pre-Christian texts, like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammabi library, there has been no popular (non-scholarly) reassessment of all that material and how it might impact our understanding of the Bible and Christianity in general. The church has always maintained they got it right in the first place, and that there's no need to rethink or (God forbid) question anything.

So that's the facts right there. Though I can't help it if a little of my own beliefs creep in and color the way I explain it. I've always thought that if you want to understand something, or discover the truth about it, you have to look at all the facts and evidence there is. Not just what the gatekeepers tell you is important, or "true". Like I said in my first post, I respect other people's right to believe in whatever they like. But for me, I can't literally believe in the Bible, after discovering everything else that was kept out of it. The gatekeepers will always say: "Well, that's because we are experts, we know more than you. So trust us." But I don't trust them. Never have, never will. At the very least (as that famous ex-actor once said): "Trust, but verify."

And that brings us back full-circle, and back on-topic, to the original post.

Criz: You're certainly right about the Bible attempted to be corrupted by various people.. Like the gospel of Thomas (It said the cross grew and starting walking and talking..). But it was excluded because it did not follow true to what the Bible has said (like prophecies). There have always been people who have tried to taint it, but I still believe it to be, as a whole, true to what it was meant to be. I have faith in that (it is called faith, after all), just as you have faith in Evolution.

Quote:

Originally Posted by criz p. critter

I've always thought that if you want to understand something, or discover the truth about it, you have to look at all the facts and evidence there is. Not just what the gatekeepers tell you is important, or "true".

I agree with that. Everyone should know and research what they believe in. That's why I listen to other people's viewpoints, but it still has not changed my point of view, even after the research I've done.

..And have a great Memorial Day :)

__________________
You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. -C.S. Lewis

Criz: You're certainly right about the Bible attempted to be corrupted by various people.. Like the gospel of Thomas (It said the cross grew and starting walking and talking..). But it was excluded because it did not follow true to what the Bible has said (like prophecies). There have always been people who have tried to taint it, but I still believe it to be, as a whole, true to what it was meant to be. I have faith in that (it is called faith, after all), just as you have faith in Evolution.

I agree with that. Everyone should know and research what they believe in. That's why I listen to other people's viewpoints, but it still has not changed my point of view, even after the research I've done.

..And have a great Memorial Day :)

Sounds cool, SergiuM. More power to ya. I never intend to convince people of anything. I just like to talk about stuff. Nice talking with you...